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Understanding Trigger Types: Audience-Based vs Event-Based Campaigns

Rubaiyat Farhan avatar
Written by Rubaiyat Farhan
Updated over 2 months ago

Choosing Your Trigger Type

The first—and most important—decision in Step 1 is selecting how your campaign will be triggered. This choice determines when your messages go out and who receives them.

Audience-Based Campaigns

Best for: Scheduled promotions, announcements, and outreach to specific customer segments.

Audience-based campaigns let you target customers based on who they are and what they've done historically. You choose your recipients ahead of time and decide exactly when to send.

Common use cases:

  • Monthly newsletters to all subscribers

  • Seasonal promotions to customers who purchased in the last 90 days

  • Re-engagement campaigns for inactive customers

  • Product launch announcements to specific customer segments

How they work: You select or create audience segments, then choose to send immediately or schedule for a specific date and time. The campaign reaches everyone in your selected audiences at the time you specify.

Event-Based Campaigns

Best for: Automated, real-time responses to customer actions and behaviors.

Event-based campaigns trigger automatically when customers take specific actions on your website or app. These are "always-on" campaigns that respond instantly to customer behavior.

Common use cases:

  • Cart abandonment recovery (when someone leaves items in their cart)

  • Welcome series (when someone subscribes or registers)

  • Purchase confirmation and follow-ups (immediately after a transaction)

  • Browse abandonment (when someone views products but doesn't add to cart)

Requirements: Event-based campaigns require MarkTag integration to track customer actions in real-time. Without MarkTag, you'll only be able to create audience-based campaigns.

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